Imsai arasan 23am Pulikesi a.k.a Microsoft Windows 7

A person would have to be stone deaf AND blind as a bat in order to have missed the slew of advertisements Microsoft has been flooding the telly with over the past couple of months, with the launch of Windows 7. Even then, said person with said weaknesses would have had to be completely cut off from a TV/Radio/News paper to have missed these ads. In other words, the only person who could've missed these is a hermit doing some good old fashioned tapas in upper reaches of the Himalayas.

The flip side of this analogy is that the audience Microsoft's ads target, spans the spectrum of the human race and a few from the animal kingdom. With such a large target, boy, did Microsoft do a Pulikesi!

Most self respecting Tamilians would have seen Imsai Arasan 23am Pulikesi and would also recall the scene on the bear hunt. The emperor, deserted by his 'loyal' followers when a bear is spotted fires several arrows and misses at point blank range. The bear is insulted by the lack of skill of its foe and, instead of killing Pulikesi, simply spits on him and moves on. An insulted Pulikesi nurses his wounds by taking up shooting classes. A soldier is tasked with holding an apple over his head so the emperor can shoot it. As each soldier dies, the target grows and is eventually replaced by a huge pumpkin, which is also missed! I may have screwed up the narrative above and made it not funny, but this was a massive slap-stick hit and still has me in splits each time I see it. Each time I see it, I also think about how implausible the whole situation is. Until Microsoft proved me wrong.

You see, the target demographic for Microsoft is massive, to say the least. A catchy ad campaign would have to capture a 3 year old and a 75 year old and everyone in between. I'm sorry to say, in classic Pulikesi fashion, Microsoft's missed them all! I have multiple bones to pick with Microsoft:

• what do you mean you got suggestions from users on what they would ACTUALLY like to see in an OS and implemented them in Windows 7? Does that mean for 20 odd years you sat on your high horse and belted out sub-standard products that didn't care about what the user wanted to do? Even if you did, I think it's a pretty big boo-boo to be admitting this every 10 minutes on telly

• one of the key features being touted is that of faster wake-up. Hasn't Apple being doing this for eons now? I can't help but noticing that my 2 year old MacBook wakes up faster than the Toshiba being showcased in the ad for faster wake up!

• a couple of the adverts feature folks being flown all the way from the UK to Tokyo/Houston just to prove the new laptops are capable of 'waking-up faster' and they are better at gaming! Each of these adverts include a limo ride to the airport in the UK, a flight to Tokyo/Houston and a gas-guzzling 4x4 ferrying the passenger from the airport to Toshiba/Dell, as the case may be. Come on Microsoft, the whole world's in a recession, you have climate change and environment friendliness being bandied about more often than Kate Moss's drunken charades or Amy Winehouse's drug-fuelled antics and here you advertise that you proudly brought a person across the world just to open a freaking laptop? Know your audience Microsoft, is that so hard?

• scriptwriters for the adverts could do with being more creative. If you want to showcase people friendliness, focus on the larger issues and club the smaller ones into a single ad for heaven's sake! Why, oh why, would you want to waste 30 seconds of precious prime-time screen real estate by having one irritating advertisement that says your new OS can arrange windows or the task bar is simple to use (again, stuff that Macs have been doing since the dawn of time!)

It's not so much an argument about the superiority of Windows over Apple's Mac OS or vice-versa. Windows 7, by Microsoft's own admission, has just become more like a Mac to use. It's as simple as that. Some changes that ought to have been done years ago, are being done now and there is nothing wrong with that, better late than never and all that. Look at Mac adverts, they are clean, simple, devoid of loud music or ignorant users (who, by the way, feel proud that they suggested something the Mac has been doing all along!), straight to the point and focussed on the features. No wonder you have fewer adverts for the Mac than Windows and no wonder again that an upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard to Mac OS X Snow Leopard costs £30 compared to £120 for an upgrade from Vista/XP to 7 - Microsoft needs the cash to fund the ads!

The ads end with, "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea!". I guess PC here stands for Puli(c)kesi...

Follow up: I now save £20,000...every month!

It is common knowledge that I saved £9,970 (£10,000 depending on how you look at it) by buying an, ahem, 'not so original' Rolex watch. Some might argue that it's not a big deal and that by buying an air ticket as opposed to buying the plane itself one can save somewhere in the region of $19,999,000 (assuming the plane is a small second hand exec jet and the ticket is a long haul one. There is no real upper limit on the amount you could save. However, you can sell the jet after the journey and recover some money out of it and the same can be said about the Rolex.

This week, I discovered I've been saving around £20,000, on average, EVERY month, for the past 288 months, that's around £5.76 million. With that kind of money, I should be richer than my wildest dreams... to date. Sadly, I'm not. This is a matter that's worth some deep introspection. And introspect is exactly what I did. Why didn't I save that kind of money? Where did I go wrong?

Some really deep analysis later, I realised something profound. In order to save money, you should have not spent it on something and in turn, in order to have the choice of not spending money on something, you should have had the money in the first place - present or future, which, sadly, I do not. Having made peace with myself on my shortcoming, I decided to spin a tabloid isstyle tale to the world (kuppura vizhundalum, meesaila mannu ottalai and all that) on how I am saving the money.

On a related note, have you heard of the Russian billionaire* who gets into a limousine in Moscow, gets stuck in traffic going to the airport, jumps into a jet and flies 6-7 hours to London Heathrow airport, gets onto another limousine, gets stuck in traffic coming into central London for a couple of hours and 2 hours later does the same thing all over again to return to Moscow?

For just two blessed hours, this monumental idiot spends around a day in travel! What does he do in those two hours - he gets a haircut. That's right, he gets his mop cropped and to do that, he comes to London all the way from Russia. Makes you wonder:

• Is there a serious dearth of barbers in Russia? Have all of them gone digging oil wells to make said moron richer still?
• Does this guy have anything at all to do in life other than getting his hair cut?
• Is this barber better than Veluchamy who used to trim my mop in school?
• Don't even get me started on the 2 hour long hair cut. If there was a way to burn my hair in a controlled manner that would rid me of extra hair in 10 seconds, I'd willingly burn it, without a second thought. I can't sit on a barber's chair for more than 15 minutes (of which I nap for 10).

The haircut itself doesn't seem too over the top to begin with (pun intended!). The reporter of one of the newspapers that came out with this story took it and in his before and after photographs, I can't really make out any difference, it looks like the hair wasn't cut at all, and it had additionally been tumble dried for good measure.

For the money you pay, according to the barber himself, you get his services for the whole day. I immediately have problems with that:

• not to be offensive, if I wanted to hang out with barbers, I can do it for free with any of the barbers I've had so far right from Veluchamy to Imran, thank you.
  
• if a Russian oligarch wants to hang out with his barber rather than his I'm-a-bigger-snob-than-you golfing partner, there is a slight problem with society at that level.
• Not only is the guy (the barber) being lazy by only servicing one client the whole day, he's actually minting money out of this!
  

Apparently, one of the highlights of the 'experience' is that you get to eat the meal of your choice WHILE your hair is being cut. Who does that? Tell that to my parents! They don't let me eat anything AFTER my hair is cut before I shower, let alone while! Imagine this conversation:
Barber: "what would like to eat, saar?"
Me: "I'll have a caviar salad, thank you"
Barber: "Will that be with or without dressing, saar?"
Me: "Without, please"
Barber: "Wokay saar, but you do realise that we cannot avoid garnishing it with hair?"
Me: trying not to be sick.

* while I could find the link to the £20,000 haircut story online, I couldn't find the link to the particular story I've referred to here. Please bear with that

P.S.: We very often tend to dismiss the work done by hairstylists as petty and demeaning, it is not. Having said that, a barber by any other name is just a barber, just like a bean counter by any other name is just as boring. What offends me is the obscene money that is spent on the act of keeping said mop clean.

P.P.S: I admire this bloke for he is making more money doing over the top work than any of ever will! Who knows, for one day, he just might engage my employer to audit his company's books with me being the audit manager, so might as well suck up to him :)!

Of customer service and the lack of it...

Let's dream up a scenario. You're running a customer service organisation. How do you keep customer complaints to a minimum? Did I hear someone say, "provide bloody good service"? Wrong. You provide world class service when you don't answer the phone when they call to complain.

Let me explain. A large telecom company in the middle-east has been in the news because it tried to allegedly bug Blackberry users' phones so they could conveniently tap into the messages and emails sent from these devices. All in the name of national security and upholding the religious, cultural and moral values of the country, no doubt. Such high objectives must always be saluted. However, said nanny software implementation went very wrong and Crackberry's started heating up and running out of juice faster than you can say "tally-ho!".

I'm no master of human psychology, but life experience tells me that humans like to complain when things go south, so I am not completely misguided in thinking that the telecom company's call centres must have been flooded with calls from every bloke whose ear was scalded by a hot and dying Blackberry. You see heat is the last thing one wants when the ambient temperatures outside hovers in the late 40s, degree Celsius that is.

I also feel it is my duty to clarify what I mean by a flood here. The Blackberry population in this country is around 145,000 out of a total population of around 3,000,000. Which is not a frightful lot, but by any standard 145,000 callers at the same time surely come within the definition of a flood. Here comes the fun part. The company issued a statement and I quote, "This has resulted in reduced battery life in a very limited number of devices. Etisalat has received approximately 300 complaints to date, out of its total customer base which exceeds 145,000". A beautiful statement and I can almost visualise the PR exec who wrote this statement giving his colleagues a hi-five on a totally truthful statement supported by verifiable figures that completely clarify the magnitude of the problem, putting an end to this circus once and for all.

Nope. The same paper that carried this statement also carries another article on this subject and I quote, this time from the newspaper, "Gulf News alone received 239 complaints about the issue since running an article on the troublesome patch on July 13.

Many of the complaints cited either a lack of response from Etisalat’s customer support lines, or a lack of awareness of the glitch among customer support agents."

Did I just visualise the PR exec scurrying for cover? I guess I did!

So there you have it, to provide the best customer service and get the least amount of complaints on your service, don't pick up the phone.

You want the icing on the cake? Etisalat has now found a solution to the problem - wipe your device, delete every scrap of data on it and make it as clean as the day it was born in the factory...